Yea...I know just what you're saying. Therein lies the rules of facebook- you really can't suggest or "push" your page onto customers or random people that you (yourself) are not friends with...UNLESS you get by with creating your "business page" as a person, for example "Jim LewisLandscape" and then you could go crazy "friending" people.

I send out a customer letter every year and the past two years I have added the "find us on facebook" spiel and it doesn't really work.

You can ask your close friends or certain friend/business associates to "suggest" your page to their friends, to expand numbers. But that's all up to them.

Bottom line, you're kinda stuck. Which in a way is good, because facebook would become unbearable if you were constantly bombarded by 'like my page' random requests.

__________________--Specializing in Professional Landscape Installations and Enhancements--

I send out a monthly newsletter on various green industry topics (see file on FB page). I email it out to clients with links and suggestions to like my page. Many peple love the newsletter but I have not gotten many likes.

I am thinking of incentives like:

free perennial for a like
discount coupon or mailer for liking us
entering into a drawing for a free ________.....
constant updated progress photos of a job

I also added a cool feature to the website that keeps live updates on the face of my page. Check it out on www.steinpropertyserices.com ( it's in the lower right corner of my main page).

Haven't tested this out, but you can login to facebook,
and then signin as your facebook page (your company page)
and send a request/suggestion to ppl to like your page.

No. I don't think you can. You can do that from the personal side. But if you have a true COMPANY page, you can't do that.

No big deal. I figured it all out. I got the page up and running and already got 30 fans of the page. Sent an email out to a couple people (will send another mass email out to clients once I get more photo albums created). My wife is a big Facebook user so she sent some sort of message out to several friends, clients, family, etc. that she was connected to. And then it just started spreading. It's been only 14 hours or so and I got 30 fans already. I feel that's off to a good start. Would like to be up to 100 soon. I think once I promote it a little more we'll be there quickly. Mainly with a newsletter to clients highlighting the page.

I also added the facebook link to my email signature. So that should help too.

Doing great with the Facebook thing. I'm actually working on a proposal right now for a design we already were hired to create for a guy that found us via Facebook. So that's cool! It's a pretty big job. In the tens of thousands.

But that's not really what Facebook is about. You shouldn't do a facebook company page thinking that it's going to get you a lot of leads. It probably won't get you a whole lot of new leads.

What I've learned in the past year or so is that Facebook isn't as much about getting new leads (although that's part of it) as it is about keeping people engaged. Facebook does what your website cannot. It keeps in constant contact with people who like or are interested in your company. Your web page doesn't notify people every time you finish a job, post new photos of your work, get a new testimonial, or have a new service or product to offer. But your facebook page does! Facebook is like having a dynamic web site that is constantly being updated with fresh information and automatically notifying all of your fans about it. It keeps them engaged!

So to me, it's more valuable for keeping your existing clients than it is for getting new ones. Although we are getting a few leads finally from it.

If it was just for getting new leads, then all the time I have spent on it making our page look nice, creating a nice welcome page, finding the right apps and posting every few days wouldn't have been worth it. But what is worth it is hearing how all of our customers love reading updates, didn't know we did certain kinds of work until they started looking at our facebook posts, etc. Now our customers have a constant reminder of us, all the stuff we do, and how nice it looks! They're more engaged than ever. And more committed too. Because now they feel like part of our community. They get to see the nice work we're doing for their neighbors, colleagues, our other customers. They get to read testimonials others post. They get constant updates on our new work. So they feel more like their part of our community and less like someone who we just did some work for once.

I've been constantly working on getting more fans. And LOCAL fans. It does you no good at all just to get fans for numbers sake. If the fans aren't in your service area, then they are of no value for you. So over 90% of the 275 or so fans that we have are either our customers or people who live in one of the towns we service and are interested in landscaping of some sort. One of my competitors here in town has literally thousands of fans. But if you click on any of them, you'll see most of them are from other countries or other parts of the U.S. So he's paying someone somewhere to get him more fans. I could do that too. They have gigs on Fiverr and eBay where you can "buy" more fans. But it's not about how many fans you have. It's about how many REAL, GOOD, LOCAL fans you have. People that might actually be customers. We're doing better than almost any other company in town at that right now. I don't think most of our competitors have over 100 fans and the one that does is all fans from other parts of the world. Where we have over 275 fans and they are almost all local. It creates a real community of people who sort of feel like they are part of your team or cheering squad. Almost like they enjoy seeing you succeed and they feel proud and vindicated for choosing you, like so many others have.

I've learned some other things about Facebook that I can't share openly. But I like it. I always look forward to posting photos of new jobs on our FB page. I love seeing how people respond to our posts. And I love it when a long term maintenance client who is one of our fans comes up to me and says, "Wow! I had no idea you guys did such nice landscape install work!" and I'm thinking, "What? You had no idea? Didn't you ever look on our website? We have hundreds of photos right there!!!" But the truth is, even our regular customers weren't checking our website too much. Only new customers were. So FB changes all that. Now all of our regular customers get to see a whole broader view of our company and what we can do. And that helps in terms of additional requests, referrals to friends, etc.

FB does lead to new work or repeat work. But it doesn't happen over night. It's a long process of getting and keeping people engaged that eventually leads to more work for you.

I don't know if it helps my SERPs or not. They say that outbound links to social media for the company gets you higher SERPs. But the thing is I was already ranked #1 for over 100 different search terms on Google/Yahoo/Bing before I ever did a FB page. And we're still #1 for all those same terms. So it's difficult for me to gauge. I don't think you need the Social medial links to get top results. Obviously, I was already getting the best results even without them, and even when several of my competitors were doing social media and had links on their site already. But I think it may help. It's maybe a small part of the Google algorithm.

Yah, it's taken a lot of effort to get up to 275 fans. I think we're almost at 280 today.